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How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

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Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#51

Post by JepZ »

vog wrote: post #13

I appreciate the write-up! I always wanted to do a similar write-up for my own setup, but I never got around to it. (My setup uses slightly with different components: exim+dovecot+spamassassin+openldap.) However, after reading this, the software developer in me feels like "These tutorials should not be necessary." This should be a GitHub repo, trivial to fork and trivial to test out locally for anyone.

I think when you setup that whole stuff yourself you are better prepared to fix any problems that might arise. I mean those are 'tutorials', sound like teaching ;-)

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#52

Post by marpstar »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #45
deadbunny wrote: post #31

> Before we dive in, an important caveat: You will become a sysadmin of your own mail server. This for me is the deal breaker. I say this as a sysadmin. It's all well and good running a single server but if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately. So to run something that doesn't require 24/7 support I now have to run a cluster of servers. I'll also need something to manage those servers like sal…

I started to go down the running my own mail server road and started to worry about every one of these issues. I decided that my time is worth more than the cost of something like FastMail.

Not to mention, regardless of time there's little chance you could do it as good as FastMail.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#53

Post by KayEss »

deadbunny wrote: post #31

> Before we dive in, an important caveat: You will become a sysadmin of your own mail server. This for me is the deal breaker. I say this as a sysadmin. It's all well and good running a single server but if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately. So to run something that doesn't require 24/7 support I now have to run a cluster of servers. I'll also need something to manage those servers like sal…

I've been running my own mail servers since the mid-90s, and always only a single server. SMTP keeps retrying, so you can be offline. The transport layer was designed to deliver mail to servers even if those servers only dialled in to one of the "internets" once per day, so it's fine to have some downtime.

It's totally up to you how you prioritise getting a server back up again, and frankly if the message can't handle at least a few hours delay then email probably isn't the right medium for it.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#54

Post by workthrowaway27 »

I've done this before. It's a pain in the ass. You have to run several different programs each with hundreds of configuration options, make sure the different programs can communicate with each other properly, make sure your email doesn't get flagged as spam, and be your own sysadmin. All for marginal benefit.

It would be great if someone wrote a program handling all of this that could be deployed as a single binary with secure defaults and limited configurability, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Email providers are good enough for almost everyone and the people who are good enough programmers to make sense of all the different protocols they'll have to deal with and get everything to interoperate nicely probably have other things to work on that people will actually pay for.

Edit: That said, this guide does look like a great resource for someone who is interested in doing this. It's interesting to learn how email works and if I had this guide when I started out I'd have saved a ton of time.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#55

Post by ryanlol »

xienze wrote: post #12
marsrover wrote: post #9

I ran my own mail server for a few months in 2013. I came to the conclusion I'd much rather pay Google $5 a month.

Fastmail will let you do it for $50 per year if you pay upfront. Just not sure why anyone would run an email server other than extreme paranoia. It’s hardly a set it and forget it affair.

Fastmail is great until their support hands your account over to some random person that just happened to ask.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#56

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

apple4ever wrote: post #48

This isn't bad. I ended up creating an Ansible role to do it for me, and it works great. I thought about Fastmail, but its too expensive when you want to do more than one email address or domain. I run mine on a $5 server from DigitalOcean.

Every time a thread about running your own email server comes up I think "Oh yeah, I was going to set up FastMail for my domain"

The current pricing[0] seems to let you have 100 domains plus 600 aliases[1] for $5/mo.

I've got this thought that I will create aliases for every different thing I sign up for and use them to track who's selling my email address to who. I think that a domain plus aliases will do the trick and I think that what I want to do will fit in their limits.

[0] https://www.fastmail.com/pricing/

[1] https://www.fastmail.com/help/account/limits.html

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#57

Post by mozumder »

agentultra wrote: post #41

I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible. Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files!…

I run my own mail server, for several years now. A Mac Mini on Mac OS Server on a static IP address. It's been great, literally zero maintenance, but it completely hides everything about the underlying architecture.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#58

Post by Torgo »

apple4ever wrote: post #42
Torgo wrote: post #7

I started running my own email server around 2014. I am using every mitigation I can find, but I still get an unending torrent of spam that slips through. If tweaking spam filters and deleting spam is your idea of fun, then run your own email server.

Spamassassin plus DNSBL works great for me. Before I enabled that, I would get 100+ spam emails a day. Now I barely get one a month.

This is what I am using as well.

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#59

Post by mrb »

sleavey wrote: post #44
deadbunny wrote: post #31

> Before we dive in, an important caveat: You will become a sysadmin of your own mail server. This for me is the deal breaker. I say this as a sysadmin. It's all well and good running a single server but if that shits the bed then you have to deal with it immediately. So to run something that doesn't require 24/7 support I now have to run a cluster of servers. I'll also need something to manage those servers like sal…

I run my own mail server, mostly for fun and to learn how it all works, but so far, after a few teething problems, it works pretty well. I don't have any critical services registered with addresses from this server; I use it for random websites (like Hacker News newsletters), cron job outputs on my server, Stack Exchange, etc., and as a way to back up my Gmail account remotely. The great thing is that I can dish out…

«The great thing is that I can dish out unique email address»

That's the number one reason I would like to run my own server. (And, no, the Gmail trick of adding "+foo" to the username doesn't satisfy me because spammers know this trick and can strip it.)

Re: How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)

#60

Post by lisper »

agentultra wrote: post #41

I run my own mail infrastructure. To say the least I wouldn't recommend it even to my worst enemies. It's horrible. Actually it's fine until it's not. Then your email doesn't work and you could be missing out on important communications. And then you're scrambling to figure out how the spammers managed to exploit your setup this time. And you have to learn a tonne of crap in order to manage it... and the text files!…

Heh, I have had the exact opposite experience. My mail setup has been stable and reliable for years. (I'm a little bit afraid to report this because one possible explanation is that I simply have not been on any serious hacker's radar screen.) I'm not doing anything fancy: just postfix+dovecot, gray listing using a custom milter I wrote in Python, and Spam Sieve running client-side on my Mac.
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